The paper advances a new architecture for seamless roaming, which is implemented at the application layer. This architecture is subject for the research projects PERIMETER and MOBICOME, recently granted by the EU STREP FP7 and EUREKA, respectively. The research challenges are on mobility management, security, QoE management, overlay routing, node positioning, mobility modeling and prediction, middleware and handover.

The foundation of seamless handover is provided by several components, the most important ones being the handover, mobility management, connectivity management and Internet mobility. The paper provides an analysis of these components